IT connection - Panini's contribution to linguistics/computer science

Panini biography

Panini is most famous for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the grammar known as Aṣṭādhyāyī "the eight chapters".

Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure[Swiss], professor of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics. Noam Chomsky has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar.

Pāṇini uses metarules, transformations, and recursions with such sophistication that his grammar has the computing power equivalent to a Turing machine. In this sense Pāṇini may be considered the father of computing machines. His work was the forerunner to modern formal language theory, and a precursor to computing. Paninian grammars have also been devised for non-Sanskrit languages. The Backus-Naur form (Panini-Backus form) or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Pāṇini's grammar rules. [From Wikipedia]